Aw, man, Cooper doesn't even make the cover!...'Copper'? That doesn't sound right.

Oddly enough, I've never picked up the Showcase collections for the Metal Men; partly because I never see the first one, and partly because I already have the Walt Simonson issues in the should-never-be-out-of-print Art of Walt Simonson. Also surprising: I didn't already have all of this one: from 2011, DC Comics Presents: Metal Men 100-Page Spectacular, mostly written by Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis, mostly drawn by Kevin Maguire!

While this starts with a reprint of the Bob Haney-written Silver Age: the Brave and the Bold #1, the rest is the complete run of back-up stories from Giffen's 2009 Doom Patrol, which I have most of but I don't think I added it to my pull list until it was already on the chopping block for cancellation. The Metal Men stories are fun, but that's all they are: there's barely a lick of development or drama, but maybe that's the way to go with them? They're largely resistant to change, or change and then quickly change back--malleable, you might say! One change should have stuck, though: the addition of new team member, Copper; but one running joke is that most of the team seems to forget her on a regular basis. (I thought she was from Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire, but Copper was actually an earlier addition, from 2007's Superman/Batman #34!) I'd love to have her back in the lineup again, like she took two years off to hitchhike across Europe, then just told everyone she had been there the whole time, and they bought it...I wondered if maybe the guys weren't building up to something, like the reason Magnus and the others never remember her was that she was some kind of plant; but now I kinda doubt that: in the last couple stories, they gave Magnus his own lab assistant/wacky sidekick, which really feels like overegging the pudding there.